Thursday, November 18, 2010

Christ the King

Our friend Cathy is recovering from surgery and I offered to preach in her parish church this coming Sunday. As I read the lessons for Sunday and some commentaries, I learned something I had not known before. In three different stories in Luke's account of the Good News, we find Jesus speaking about today.

Near the beginning of Luke, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue and, after reading a passage from Isaiah,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

he says, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

Near the end of Luke, we find the story of Jesus' encounter with the tax collector Zacchaeus. Jesus is passing through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem and, in order to get a better view of him, Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree. Jesus sees him and says, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” After dinner, Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

In Sunday's lesson, we find the third of these stories. Jesus is on the cross and one of the two men being crucified with him says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replies, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Jesus came to "proclaim the year of the Lord's favor," to bring us and all creation the Good News of God's unconditional love. Throughout his ministry, that love was made real today, not off in the future, in the sweet bye and bye, but in the present moment. The response of the religious people in the synagogue in Nazareth was to attempt to throw Jesus off a cliff. They could not fathom how Jesus, whom they had watched growing up, could make such an offer. I know that in my own life, and in the lives of people with whom I have been privileged to work and worship, there are times when Jesus' offer is rejected, often because we can't fathom how we could even begin to deserve God's love. But Zacchaeus and the man crucified with Jesus grasped what we so often fail to grasp. It isn't at all about deserving or having played by the rules; it's simply about God's grace, about God's deciding to love us even though we don't deserve that and far too often reject it.

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Daniel Weir

The Thin Tradition

The opinions expressed in this Blog - which was originally called The Gospel in ToyTown - are solely those of the author. You are free to reproduce or link to another site anything that I post here. Please let me know if you do that and please acknowledge this blog as the source of reproduced material.

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About Me

After nearly 22 years in Western New York, I retired on June 30, 2010 and moved "back home" to Massachusetts, to Danvers. Six years later we moved to the Mount Washington Valley, where we met in 1971 and got married in 1972. Six For the eight and a half years prior to retiring, I served as the Rector of Saint Matthias Church, the Episcopal Parish in East Aurora in the Diocese of Western New York. Since my ordination in 1972, I have served as the Assistant Chaplain at Balliol College, Oxford; as a parish priest in Western Massachusetts and Western New York; as a member of the diocesan staff in Western New York; as the Director of the Erie County Commission on Homelessness (now the Homeless Alliance of Western New York); and as a religion teacher at Cardinal O'Hara High School.